Dragon Skin armour on ebay

I can't believe I just spent 50 seconds of my life watching that video, I don't like to pass judgment, but could we please delete that post? Mods, anyone?

Shattered OUT...

Originally posted by dismanrc
DO you really think they pay $1000 for a toilet seat?

No of course not...I know the money is for black budget projects...AND..for lining pockets...like it or not...that money also finds its way to off shore accounts.

What i am saying is...whateve black project or means they have for that poorly spent money is NOT more important then outfitting us with the best available gear first. Then go lie about how much you paid for the seat or hammer.

I have been around the military game long enough before coming back to the civilian world to understand the misguided suits in DC allocating money to places it shouldn't be going.

reply to post by rcwj75


The military also has a bad habit of buying something and then using it for something else.

Case in point… the HUMVEE. It was built to replace the jeep as an all terrain general transport and utility vehicle. Then they start using it in combat roles and patrols and wonder why it get blown to bits all the time.

The answer? Pile on more armor. Get real; it’s not made to be an APC.

The Striker? It was designed to be a lightly armored replacement for the deuce and half, not as an APC

The Bradley was designed to be the APC.

reply to post by dismanrc


Yes, VERY true....but thats thanks to the Never have been, never wiil be, never wanted to be soldiers in DC. The funds and budgets along with the expectations always come from guys who have NEVER been there, NEVER done that...yet they know whats best. Its amazing to me.

Thats like me telling a hospital what medications to buy and what equipment they need. I don't know jack ---- about anything beyond combat first aid/cpr....so why should I think like I do???

Gotta love politicians...

if the vests that were sent (and supposedly wound up on ebay) were first articles, that would indicate that there weren't many produced. shouldn't it be relatively easy to identify the ones on ebay as real or not?

Originally posted by dismanrc

Originally posted by rcwj75
They will pay $1000 for toilet seats to be installed in all government facilities, but say they don't have the budget to buy the best for our boys in uniform...

DO you really think they pay $1000 for a toilet seat?

People yell about the government overpaying for things and then talk about all the “black” budgets the military has.

Think about it. If you get $1000 to spend, but only show receipts for $100, what would your boss do? The bad thing about how the government works is the way it handles money. If you spend less this year you can’t save it for next year and your budget will be cut by that much next year. Because you didn’t need it last years means you don’t need it this year. It the old use it or lose it world. Couple this with trying to hide projects in the black world and you end up with $1000 toilet seats.

Most is greed.
Look at that national debt.. It's well over 52 trillion.. see they don't count the SS money they took.. That program was to be like a pension... now it's all general funds and has been for some time.. yet they don't count the money they took from that program as a debt. Give it a few decades and senors will panhandling in the streets to afford cat food for dinner.

The government has some huge issues... Assuming that the government will pay more for a troop to die then to give him better armor seems to raise a question. I'd point to the number of faces that light up at the word "sacrifice" and get a blank stare at the word victory. So what is that question?

You can see the presidents face light up as he said we need more "sacrifice".

It seems easy for some that it noble to ask their citizens to die... Perhaps think they think it the Christian thing to do... kill the troops that is... you know live by the sword and they'll help you die by it type of a thing. I'm just guessing as it's hard to explain why a government who's bombs are being dropped on it's foreign nationals would ask them to pay for rescue as in Lebanon. Thousands of things like that... like back when the marines were put in Lebanon during the civil war with ->no bullets

reply to post by ShatteredSkies



Nature's version can stop fast flying insects with just a few strands, imagine what machine woven, geneteticly enhanced, millions of threads can stop..

If the government really wants something... they don't need taxes. They go to the Fed and it prints the money. They do this with hundreds of billions per year.


Taxes are just a way of keeping the common people down and holding inflation in check by sucking up dollars. None of it is necessary to fund government. They have printing presses.




[edit on 21-4-2008 by ianr5741]

reply to post by mindping


Hmmm.

How are you going to mechanically weave genetically enhanced spider silk?

Shattered OUT...

reply to post by ianr5741


You have sources to back this up?

If it were true then I'd imagine the nation's economy to have collapsed on itself long ago and to never have recovered.

Even the Nazi's during WWII were forced to counterfit millions upon millions of currency to fund their war, why didn't they just print more notes if that was always an option?

Shattered OUT...

Originally posted by NewWorldOver

Originally posted by rcwj75
Dragon Skin is some of the best ballistic protection available. The reason it gets it's negative tag is because the other companies all wanted the contract to outfit our soldiers.

Disgusting and true, I'm sure. How the military gets away with these kinds of things over and over is beyond me. Obviously, the American public and the American soldier is not in control of the American Army.

Why is it you Expect the US army to have the very best equipment? Before the gulf war, everyone was happy with us having rough parity with the rest of the world. It's thinking like you do that is the main problem today.

You expect to be able to fight wars without taking a significant number of casualties, just as long as we throw enough money at the problems of warfare. This is the legacy of the first gulf war. Now that's not a problem for me, since I plan to work for defense contractors, but that is a problem for everyone else. If people expected tens of thousands of our citizen soldiers to die in any given armed conflict of notable scale, there'd be a lot more public outcry against it. Iraq hasn't claimed the lives of even half of ten thousand of our soldiers. It's like a black hole for our tax dollars, (or really, borrowed money from the national debt), but in terms of lives, it's trivial compared to all the major armed conflicts of the last century.

The army should be equipped to the degree which we find strikes a good balance between how much we want to use our tax money for domestic things, and how much we want to kill people abroad. I fully believe that we don't have much of a desire to kill people in largely useless foreign countries for no discernible benefit, yet we spend billions of dollars doing so. We certainly aren't in it for the oil, since we BUY it at market price off of puppet organizations in Iraq, which have to use the money just to keep it flowing. And it's not like Iraq is even a particularly oil-rich nation to begin with.

Now of course we're stuck in two such conflicts with nothing to gain out of the situation, so we are obligated to equip our troops well, so they don't die. Then the matter is: is dragon scale armor better enough to warrant purchase?

From what I've seen, probably not. It provides good level IV protection, all around, except rounds coming in from the direction against which it is overlapped. That isn't too bad of a problem, since that would already be a glancing blow. It's flexible, compared to interceptor with plates, but it's much heavier for a suit that covers the same amount of the body as a suit of interceptor with plates. It does, however, provide more complete coverage against rifle rounds than interceptor that covers the same area; the parts that don't have plates are only good against pistol rounds and shrapnel.

And then there are issues with discs coming unglued from their backing under fatigue tests, or, in some versions, wires that hold the vest together can snap if damaged, and cause the vest to critically fail.

Really, bullets aren't the leading cause of fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'd say that it would be better to keep the same armor until something dramatically better comes out, and look for ways to prevent deaths from shrapnel and overpressure, common to explosive blasts. It would be best to take the pareto philosophy to heart here.

You'll notice that the US army does this same thing for other equipment too. We use the M-16 still, not because it's the best, but because nothing is dramatically better to the point where it is worth replacing.

I don't trust the manufacturer of either armor, nor the representatives of the US army. It's likely that they're all lying, to different degrees.

That said, consider yourselves lucky to have free, issued quality, level IV armor. That puts you on par with or ahead of the rest of the world.